There's No Speed Limit

I read an article back in December by Derek Sivers titled "There's no speed limit (The lessons that changed my life.)" In the article Derek describes the music lessons he received from musician Kimo Williams. Williams taught Derek two years Berkley School of Music coursework in theory and arranging in only a few lessons. Derek then went on to test out of 6 semesters of required classes and graduated in two and a half years.

I love reading inspirational stories but I think this one had an especially acute effect on me. Williams motto was that "there's no speed limit" in terms of what you can learn and how fast you can learn it. The only limit is your own expectations and your willingness to work hard. This got me thinking about all the different artificial limits that we are conditioned to accept as we grow up. Each year in school you are supposed to learn a certain amount of information that the higher-ups have deemed adequate for your grade. Each year you move up a grade and the level of what you learn raises a little bit more. Sure, some people go a little bit above that expected limit or some don't quite reach that benchmark but by and large, there is a limit to what you are expected to do.

I wonder how many of us still operate with a similar limitation once we leave the organized school system? I've always been a pretty bright guy but for some reason I've never really sat down and challenged myself to the extent that Derek did during his lessons with Kimo Wiliams. There shouldn't be anything holding me back. Between libraries and the amazing possibilities that the internet opens I have access to almost any information I could possibly want. The only thing that is preventing me from doing something with all that information is my own expectations for myself.

From now on I'm going to try to remember that there's no speed limit. I can learn as much as I want and as quickly as I can handle it. I don't have to wait to move up to the next "grade," buy the next volume, or wait for anybody else around me. My own development is going to be set by my own expectations which, from now on, are going to be very high. If I don't set my expectations for myself at an adequate level, there is nobody else that will. It's up to me.

How high are your expectations? Are you meeting them?

How to Leverage Low Energy Into High Returns

Despite my best intentions or repeated urgings, sometimes I just don't have the energy to work on my most passionate projects. The things I do that add value to my life are not necessarily the easiest of activities. Writing blog posts, editing and analyzing game film, planning practices, and researching teaching/coaching strategies takes a lot of effort and I can generally only do them well when I have a lot of energy. It would be naive of me to expect my energy levels to always be high. However, it would be equally naive of me to forego doing anything productive just because I'm not at 100% energy level.

First of all, I would like to preface this entire article by reminding everyone (including myself) that sometimes low energy is a sign of needing a break. I'm talking about more than a get-up-and-walk-around-for-ten-minutes break. If you are experiencing recurring low energy levels that you can't seem to shake, consider spending a significant amount of time (at least an entire day) recharging your mental and physical batteries. It may not feel like it at the time, but allowing yourself time to regroup and refocus can be much more productive in the long run than slogging through fatigue.

Assuming your low energy isn't a sign of needing a more serious break, it is possible to utilize it and remain productive. Regardless of my passion, I will always have certain administrative tasks to take care of. Responding to certain email, tracking my finances, paying bills and cleaning my living space are all activities that need to be done. Luckily, they don't require much, if any, brainpower or energy to undertake. I like to save these tasks and batch them together for times of low energy. I'm not about to waste my valuables state of high-energy on doing dishes or inputting receipts.

The other type of low-energy task that I like to occasionally undertake when I'm feeling tired is brainstorming. Sometimes, the more tired I am the crazier ideas I have for future blog posts and new projects. It really just consists of kicking back in a comfy chair with a warm drink and a notebook and letting the ideas flow. It's a very high reward task that needs to be taken care of but doesn't necessarily demand that I use my most valuable time to accomplish it.

If you are having trouble coming up with ideas of tasks you can save for those periods of low-energy, here's a quick list that I like to refer to from time to time:

1. Work on whatever book I'm currently reading: I always try to keep a book that I'm working on with me at all times. If it isn't something too intellectually challenging it can be the perfect filler for any time I'm not feeling very energized (as long as I don't fall asleep!).

2. Clean something: This is assuming that you aren't procrastinating on doing something important and actually don't have the energy to tackle anything else. I usually do my best work early in the morning or late at night, so I'll save any cleaning I need to do for the middle of the day.

3. Watch some educational videos: There are so many great resources out there for watching educational video. It doesn't take a whole lot of energy to kick back and watch something and who knows, you might even get something out of it.

4. Listen to some podcasts: I tend to let new episodes of my favorite podcasts build up without listening to them. If I'm feeling particularly listless one afternoon I like to block out a couple hours to catch up.

5. Start proofreading: If I'm proofing something for the last time in preparation for publication, then this is definitely not a low-energy activity. However, the first couple times I read over something I've written I'm just trying to find glaring mistakes. It doesn't require me to be completely on top of my game and it is definitely something productive.

Make your own list of activities or tasks you can do when you are feeling low-energy and you will never have to feel guilty about not being productive again. Or, get this, take a nap and get back to what really matters!

The Essentials of Simplicity, Part 3

Once you have mastered the principle of using all you have and purging, the next aspect you can focus on is wanting less. If you can't train yourself to want less, all of the purging you did in part two is nigh useless. Unfortunately, I think this may also be the hardest of the principles I've talked about so far to learn and implement. Most Americans (and people from the Westernized world in general) have been socialized to never be satisfied with what they have. The focus is always on achieving more, attaining more, more, bigger, more, bigger ad nauseum. Obviously, the focus on progress is not always a negative idea. I'm fully in favor of all the progress mankind has achieved since the beginning of time. I like my computer, the Internet, my affordable clothes and the car I drive. However, at some point each individual needs to decide when they have achieved enough to live the life they desire. The lower that level is, the quicker you can start living a life focused on doing rather than having.

Breaking a lifetime of socialization is hard, so what can you do to take a step toward accepting what you have and wanting less?

1. Get perspective: The recent earthquake in Haiti is a great time to realize how lucky the vast majority of us are. We all have so much "stuff" that we take for granted it takes massive natural disasters for us to snap out of our mindlessness. Take a look around the world and realize how many people are living with so much less than you.

2. Make a list of everything you own: This is tied to the idea of getting perspective. Sit down for an hour or two and seriously try to write down everything you own. Even if you try to live a fairly minimalist existence I think you will be surprised with how much you already own. Take your list, read through it a couple times, and then watch some news footage from the earthquake in Haiti. Or spend 10 minutes looking up different aid organizations in Africa. What do you think the people who are living in the streets of Haiti's list might look like?

3. Get more use out of what you already have: How many of us really know how to use every feature on our digital camera? Are you getting every last bit of use out of everything you own? Take 30 minutes and read through the various owner manuals that you have laying around for all your stuff. Learn how to do something new with something you already have.

4. Remove temptations: Unsubscribe from promotional emails. Don't look at catalogs that come in the mail. Try to avoid television commercials. All of these advertisements are trying to get you to override your better judgement and get you to part with your hard earned money.

If you can take steps toward wanting less, your life will become simpler. You will spend less money, have less possessions cluttering your home, and you will appreciate what you do have even more.

The Essentials of Simplicity, Part 2: Purging

In part one of this series I talked about the principle of using all you have. To begin living a simpler life, it is necessary to use as little of something as possible at at time. I talked about the example of chapstick and pens, but this principle applies to anything that is used up over time. The necessary focus that it takes to accomplish this principle is also a useful exercise in mindfulness. Restricting yourself to one pen at a time or stocking your pantry only with food that will actually be eaten requires you to be more aware of yourself and your actions.

The second essential of simplicity is purging. Simplification requires the expulsion of everything that doesn't matter, materially, psychically, spiritually, etc. in favor of what does. Depending on the amount of stuff you own right now, this step could vary in difficulty and time to achieve. When I first started thinking about living a simpler life, I had a multitude of things to purge. I had to reduce my wardrobe from the ridiculous state it had become. I had to get rid of the absolute mess that had become my book collection. I tried to reduce the amount of stuff I owned from every aspect of my life. This can be a tough principle to adapt if you are particularly attached to your material belongings. I won't bother giving you a step-by-step process for reducing the clutter in your life (it has been done many times before). What I can tell you is what worked for me.

THE POWER OF PILES

I would make three piles as I went through my stuff, a "Keep It For Sure" pile, a "Toss It" pile, and a "I'm Not Really Sure" pile. What you do with the first two piles is obvious; it's the third one that causes problems. I would take everything in the I'm Not Really Sure pile and put it in a box, and I'd put that box somewhere out of sight and out of mind. If I ended up needing something from that box in the next 6 months, I would go get it. Anything left in the box after 6 months was officially removed from my life. I think this tactic is helpful because you can take a sort of trial run with less stuff in your life without completely committing to getting rid of everything right off the bat.

PURGING YOUR MIND

I would be remiss if I ended the discussion on purging without talking the non-material component. Purging our physical possessions is important and often gives the most visible evidence of living a simpler life. However, purging our minds of distracting projects, doubts, worries, and fears is just as important. My experience with David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system was the starting point for purging my projects and getting my life under control. It doesn't matter if you use a system like GTD or something of your own devising, the principle is the same. You need to sit down and write down every single thing that is on your mind. A complete mind dump. Once you have everything out and on paper, you can start clarifying your commitments, tossing out irrelevant projects, and planning. The act of putting every worry and every project on paper is very refreshing; purging the stuff that doesn't matter from that list is even more so.

IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO OVER-PURGE

One final word of advice from my own experience: err on the side of over-purging. I have found that there is very little in life that I cannot replace if I find that I end up needing it. It is disturbingly easy to add more components to your life, but very hard to remove them. Start on the side of over-removal and you can slowly add back complexity if you so desire. Most people I have talked to about this aspect of living a simpler life all have the same experience in that they were initially doubtful of purging their hard-earned possessions and commitments. However, shortly after doing so they realized the amazing draining (yet almost unseen) power that a life of excess has.

I encourage you to take a hard look at your surroundings. Ask yourself if everything on your project list is as necessary as you think it is. What can be reduced? What can be purged?

The Essentials of Simplicity, Part 1: Using All You Have

Today marks the first of a three-part series I'm calling The Essentials of Simplicity. Over the next couple weeks I will publish the remaining parts. Each article will focus on an idea of simplicity that I think is vital to living a simpler life. If you have a handle on these five principles, simplifying your life will go much smoother and easier.

The first Essential of Simplicity is using all you have. Sounds pretty simple and probably trite, right? I agree, it is. Before you completely dismiss me as grasping at straws, take a second to go to your bathroom and look under the sink. Or in a drawer. Do you have any duplicates of the materials in there? Are they both opened and half used? What about in your office? How many pens are you currently using on a daily basis? How many notebooks are currently in some phase of completion?

THE SAGA OF THE CHAPSTICK

I think the ability to use something all the way to completion is a key skill in simplifying life. I realized this principle a couple years ago when I was averaging a lost chapstick every week or so. I could never keep track of it for any longer than that and was consequently having to buy new ones constantly (chapstick is required in winter in Bowling Green!). I would always seem to find all my lost chapsticks at the same time so I would alternate between not having any to suddenly having four or five partially used ones. I finally realized that it was ridiculous that I couldn't keep track of something so trivial, so I decided I would not buy another chapstick until I completely used one up. Amazingly, I didn't lose my solitary chapstick. In fact, I had to become much more mindful of where I put it after I used it because I knew that if I didn't finish it completely, I was going to have to go without. Sometime in my sophomore year of college I completely finished my first chapstick. Think about it, have you ever kept track of one of these long enough to actually use it until there is nothing left in it? It's a surprisingly good feeling. An added bonus is that you will have to increase your mindfulness to keep track of one of anything. You can't just mindlessly throw that chapstick somewhere and expect to find it later. Your actions and thoughts have to become more deliberate.

THE NATURE OF OFFICE SUPPLIES

Another area I decided to apply this principle was with my office supplies. I used to be very cavalier with losing pens and pencils because I seemed to always have a huge reserve of back up utensils. However, I realized that it was pretty lame that I couldn't keep track of a pen long enough to even think about having to replace it because it was empty. So, I decided to pack up all my pens and pencils, except for one of each, and put them somewhere inconvenient. I would now have to keep track of my one pencil and my one pen until I used them up all the way. If I lost one, I'd have to go break into my very inconveniently located reserves.

Think about all the consumables in your life that you have duplicates of. Do you really need to have more than one "in action" at any time? I would recommend starting with your bathroom and them moving into the kitchen (check out that pantry!) and your office. All three of these places seem to breed identical, partially used, duplicates.

I realize that this is an incredibly simple idea. However, if you've never tried implementing it you might be surprised at the difficulty of doing so. Use what you have, one at a time, until it's gone. And then use another one, one at a time, until it's gone. The added mindfulness and the reduction in waste will be a surprisingly liberating feeling.

The Autotelic Personality in Action

Do you love your job? Really, really love your job? Is it because you make a ton of money? Or, is it because you actually love doing your job? Most people will agree that the key to living a fulfilled life is finding something that you love doing just for the sake of it-- and do it a lot. If you can make a living doing this activity that you love so much you would do for free, then you are absolutely golden.

I've written about developing an autotelic personality in the past. However, it is one thing to read about it and something entirely different to see in action. As a teacher, I understand that people learn in a multitude of different ways. Many students cannot understand a concept through just visual means; they often need visual reinforcement. I was lucky enough to stumble across this short documentary a few weeks ago that is the best example of autotelism in action that I have ever seen.

All three characteristics that I've written about before, setting goals, becoming immersed in an activity, and learning to enjoy immediate experience are evident in abundance in this video. Working as a cashier at a fast food restaurant is probably not an activity that most of us would consider doing just for the sake of it. In other words, it doesn't really seem to lend itself to autotelism. However, if you can find a way to truly enjoy a job that may seem mundane, I can't help but think life becomes just a little bit more enjoyable. I mean, just watch the video. Does "the Wendy's Guy" seem like he is enjoying life?

I used to work as a "cart attendant" at a major retail store while I was in high school. Basically, my responsibility was to get the shopping carts out of the parking lot and back into the store. At first, I hated the job; it was boring. However, I started making it into a game where I would never let the number of carts in the store get below a certain level. I had something to work toward and it in turn made me a better employee. Instead of the "cart bitch" that I initially thought of myself as, I changed my mental title to "cart wrangler." I corralled the carts like a cowboy herded cattle. Every once in awhile I had to make the trek all the way across the parking lot to collect a stray and the cowboy metaphor was reinforced. The carts were sitting out in the parking lot like lost cows-- it was my job to collect them and bring them home. Sometimes I would see how many I could push at once, or sometimes I would see how quickly I could clean out one section of the parking lot. There were countless ways to make my seemingly boring job into something more interesting and even fun. Looking back, this seems incredibly lame but it really did help make the time go by faster and I think, in a small way, it shows the power of autotelism.

The "Wendy's Guy" takes this to a whole new extreme with the way he approaches his job. It almost seems like he plays his cash register like a musical instrument. It's really an amazing thing to see. I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch this documentary and see if there is anything you can learn. If a fast food cashier can enjoy his job so much, is there any reason you can't find some enjoyment in your employment?

Getting to the Source of Your Procrastination

Procrastination is often more about distraction than anything else. When you are easily distracted, or there are many things that can distract you nearby, it is easy to procrastinate. With the new year I'm sure many people will be resolving to stop procrastinating. Whether that means your job, school work, or other tasks you need to get done but can't seem to sit down and do, procrastination is a killer. Instead of resolving to end your procrastination, try resolving to eliminate distractions instead. In my experience, distractions are the true culprit.If you've trained your mind and prepared your environment, the distractions are removed and the procrastination seems to fade away.

What distracts you? When you sit down to do some serious work, what do you find yourself doing instead? My biggest distractions come to the fore when I try to write. My biggest ones are:

1. The need for order: If I sit down to do something that is not particularly easy (like write a blog post or prepare a lesson plan) I immediately seem to realize that my surroundings are out of order. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't bother me too much that my books are not in alphabetical order or my pens are not arranged in my drawer by level of remaining ink. As soon as I sit down to write, however, I have an incredible (and utterly useless) urge to clean, organize or put things in order. It never fails.

2. Perfectionism: How can I expect to write an article when I haven't picked the perfect title?! How am I supposed to plan a lesson on World War II if I haven't found the perfect opening question or activity?! I can't use this PowerPoint presentation because all of the pictures are not perfectly aligned! That battle between attention to detail and perfectionism is one that quite often will stymie me from doing anything particularly productive. Breaking out of that commitment to perfectionism is incredibly important to getting ANYTHING done.

3. My own inadequacies: Writing for this blog has made this a new distraction for me. I've always been pretty good at the things I try to do. I was a pretty good hockey player. I was an excellent student. However, I've never written for an audience (even the small one I've been able to accumulate at this blog). How can I sit down and write about this stuff when a.) I'm not very good at the stuff I write about (even though I think about it a lot and try to implement it) and b.) there are so many other blogs out there with huge readerships and really interesting things to say (Zen Habits, The Simple Dollar, Productivity 501 etc.)?

4. The need for constant new information: This might be the number one distraction that constantly begs for my attention. Checking email, checking my RSS feeds, Twitter, instant messaging, and news websites all provide little shots of stimulation that aren't particularly important but take up an disproportionate amount of my time. One of the biggest "tips" that I've discovered I need to do to do anything particularly productive or difficult is to turn all of that off. All of it. No texting, no Twitter, no email, nothing. Breaking the hold that these services have over my attention is something that I work on everyday. Anything that breaks up your attention is something that takes away from you doing truly great and important work. It's tough, but get rid of it as much as possible.

Lastly, I realize the irony of writing an article about distraction when the chances are  I'm distracting you by writing this article.  Please forgive me for taking a few minutes of your time. However, if this has gotten you to think a little bit more about the role distractions play in your work, I think this initial time investment might be worth it. Now stop being distracted and go do what you know you're supposed to do!

Simplifying Your New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year again. That one where we all make promises to ourselves that get broken in about two months. We all start with the greatest of intentions but life seems to slowly intervene until we're back to December wondering why our resolutions from a year ago didn't stick. There are as many ways to tackle making new Year's Resolutions as there are ways to break them. Are you just going to pick one overall goal for the year? Maybe you'll do a different goal for each month of the year? How about selecting multiple goals from different areas of your life? I've tried almost all of them and I've had varying levels of success. This year, however, I'm going to try something new.

First of all, why do we make resolutions? It's because we feel like we aren't doing things we should (or we are doing things we shouldn't) and we feel some type of guilt, shame, or other negative feeling. We feel this way because we realize that when we don't stick to those "things" we resolve to do, we drift further from living how we think we should live. In other words, we lose sight of our values.

If you've never thought about your values, I may have just lost you there. Your values are the principles or ideas that guide your life (i.e. help you make decisions). In the past, I've written about my values such as Growth, Family, Critical Thinking and Discipline, to name a few. Most people will have a huge list of values that they give varying degrees of importance; these just happen to be a few of my most important ones. Your values are the principles that you hold most dear and they are the metric by which you decide if you are doing the things you should. A person without values is rudderless and set adrift in a sea of endless stimulus.

My idea for this year's resolutions, instead of just grabbing ideas out of thin air for things "I'd like to do," is to use my list of values. Why make a new list of resolutions when I already have a list of values that I want to live closer to anyway? Each month I'm going to take one value to focus on. At the end of the month, I'm going to set aside some time to reflect and see how successful I was in strengthening that one, and all the other, values that I think are important. Did I do anything to grow as an individual? What did I do for my family? Did I have any good examples of showing integrity? Spending a few minutes throughout the year (monthly, weekly, bi-monthly, whatever) will help me keep these values in the forefront of my mind and hopefully help me make better decisions.

This year I encourage you to make a different list than your normal collection of "resolutions" that actually don't resolve much of anything and dissolve a couple months later. The whole point of making these resolution is to live a life more like the one we envision for ourselves. We need lasting change that matters, not a brief burst of well-meaning. Instead, if you haven't already, sit down and figure out your values. What are the five or six principles that you live your life by? That right there is the basis for your New Year's resolutions and the basis for long-term success.

My resolution this year is to live a life of value based on my values. What's yours?

Slay Monsters with Your Self-Discipline

Self-discipline makes everything easier. The problems is that developing that self-discipline is anything but easy. It takes conscious effort to nurture and practice being self-disciplined. Luckily, you don't have to tackle a monster of a goal to become a self-disciplined person. You can tame the monster by practicing your skills on the lesser minions that you face throughout your day.

Like any other skill, self-discipline is a skill that can be practiced. As a coach, I want the players on my hockey team to become better-- but I don't just have them scrimmage during practice. Instead, we work on individual skill sets like passing, shooting, and skating. When all of these are put together the result is a better hockey player. Self-discipline is like that. You start with something very small and easy to do. As you get better at it (i.e. more self-disciplined) you can start to ramp up the difficulty.

Being self-disciplined can only be developed by taking action consistently. You have to pick something that you want to get better at and make yourself do it, all the time. Two easy ways I've improved my self-discipline is by making my bed every morning and stopping the terrible habit of biting my nails. These may seem incredibly trivial, but how are you going to trust yourself to do anything more difficult (like train for a marathon) when you don't even have the self-discipline needed to make your bed? Once your mind is convinced you can handle the easy stuff, you can turn your slightly strengthened self-discipline onto bigger and better things.

If writing that novel or finishing a triathlon or anything that takes more than a modicum of effort is one of your goals, you probably need to develop your self-discipline. Don't be afraid to start your training with the smallest of actions. Make your bed, put your laundry away immediately, do the hardest task on your to-do list first. Master the trivial. Master the minion. Then, master the monster.

The Beauty of the Late Night Mind Dump

It is truly amazing what a late night cup of coffee can do for my restless and scattered mind. This is not the first time that I have sat down with a cup of brew after the sun has gone down and spent a couple hours figuring out my life. My to-do and project list has been pitifully short the past couple weeks. That may sound like a good thing, but I assure you it is not. My short list was a product of keeping too much in my mind. I didn't think I really had that much up there anyway, considering my reduced responsibilities and lack of a full-time job. However, once I started writing and sipping my coffee, I rattled off three pages of ideas, concerns, projects, to-dos and other flotsam that was clogging my neural passageways.

Despite my new writing projects and renewed commitment to making something of myself as a writer, I've been plagued by an uneasy sense of underwhelming. I have a ton of free-time and I have not been using it as well as I should. This late night brain dump has filled me with a new sense of energy and purpose, something I have lacked for too long.

The most important thing I accomplished from this activity was breaking down some ill-defined and vague goals into steps that I can actually execute. For example, when it comes to my coaching I don't know what exactly I want to do or how far I'm going to go. I do, however, have some excellent contacts with former coaches (including an ex-NHL coach) that I should utilize. So, I spent a couple minutes to track down some email addresses and phone numbers and will be sitting down next week to discuss my coaching future with a couple of guys who really know what they are talking about. I still don't know what my future holds in terms of coaching, but at least I have taken steps to figure it out.

I really don't know if the combination of late-night caffeine and subtle self-loathing is my ticket to these flashes of motivation and self-realization. All I know is that once every couple months I brew myself a hot cup of joe, resist the urge to go to bed, sit down at my desk with a pen and a piece of paper (or three), and just let my worries, thoughts, and ideas flow out.

Using Your Free Time to Support Your Passions

The constructive use of free time is something that is very important to me and lately I've been doing a terrible job utilizing it. In a world with almost endless opportunity for growth, learning, stimulation, and entertainment how do you decide what to spend your free time on? Whenever I feel like I'm in a slump of some sort, it can usually be traced back to the way I've been using my attention and time.

In a perfect world, the way I spend my extra time would be the way that I spend the time making my living. They would be one and the same. However, even if you don't live that perfect situation of having your passion and your livelihood be the same thing, there are still constructive ways to use your free time that will support or improve whatever it is that your "great work" consists of. Or, in my situation, the two things that I am passionate about (teaching and coaching) are not something I can really "do" in my free time. I need to be in a classroom to teach or on the ice to be coaching hockey.

Figuring out what I can dog to make constructive use of my free time while improving myself as a teacher and a coach is what has been consuming the majority of my attention the past couple weeks. I want to get better at what I do, but I don't know how to do that. I can read about teaching/coaching, I can write about it, I can watch videos or listen to podcasts; but unless I am actually DOING the activity, I don't think I'm actually getting any better.

How do you handle a situation where your passion is not necessarily creating something (like teaching or coaching) but you still want to get better at it in your free time? I really don't have any answers to this question. All I know is that in my quest for the simpler life, I want to be able to take steps to become even better at what I do, even during my free time.

Quality Over Quantity is the Core of Simplicity

I think simplifying gets a bad rap because of the imagery that many people associate with it.  "Living a simple life?  That means having an empty house and no possessions, right?  Basically, you just sit around and think about your existence all day-- maybe do a little yoga?"

However, when I think of simplifying my life, I think of quality.  I think about eliminating all the random junk that seems to fill up my life and only keeping the stuff that I actually care about.  For me, a life of simplicity is a life of richness.  This principle, replacing quantity with quality, can be applied to almost every aspect of your life, not just your possessions.

For example, think about your relationships.  How many friends do you actually have?  Do you have a large group of people that you "sort of" know, but very few, if any, extremely close friends?  A large group of acquaintances can be beneficial at times, but I would argue that a small number of truly high quality friendships is best.  Keeping up with that large group of semi-friends can be very time and attention consuming.  It's much simpler to be an active and contributing part to just a few people's lives that you truly and deeply care about.

Another place that many people, myself included, could stand to apply the quality over quantity concept is in the information they receive throughout the day.  Timothy Ferriss and other "lifehack" authors have proposed the idea of low-information diets before.  The incredibly fast pace and ubiquity of information raining down on the average person is truly mind boggling.  How many feeds are in your RSS reader? How many other websites do you check on a daily (or hourly) basis? How many emails do you get in a day? Every aspect of our lives online could stand to be looked at in a critical light.  Every couple weeks I like to go through my feed reader and remove subscriptions to blogs that no longer add enough value to my life.  Without taking this step, I slowly keep adding more sites to follow, more information to keep up with, until I'm spending an hour or more everyday trying to get my unread feeds down to zero.

Lastly, the most obvious part of your life that the quality over quantity concept can be applied is with your physical possessions.  I am trying to take steps toward saving and buying higher quality versions of items that I use everyday.  For example, instead of buying a set of cheap knives for your kitchen consider buying one very high quality chef's knife.  Or, instead of buying a lot of cheap clothes that wear out very quickly, try saving for some higher quality and timeless clothes that will last longer.

If you are curious about simplifying your life I encourage you to try thinking of it as living a life of higher quality, instead of reduced quantity.  By eliminating your low quality possessions, relationships, and attention sinks, you are left with the true essentials of life.

There is no reason a life of simplicity should be a life of deprivation.

The Role of Self-Discipline in Self-Development

I'm a huge believer that self-discipline is the keystone to all sustained self-development.  Without self-discipline, when your enthusiasm fails and excitement fades you are left where you started.  Self-discipline is the difference maker that separates the truly amazing people from the average.  Luckily, developing rock solid self-discipline is not reserved for elite athletes and military personnel.  Anybody can become the self-disciplined stud that people turn to for help and admire from afar.

I must confess from the start that I almost feel fraudulent for trying to write this.  I am not nearly as self-disciplined as I wish I was.  In fact, sometimes my lack of self-discipline makes me sick.  However, I have at least come to the realization that this is something I want to work on and improve.  I want to share my successes and failures with you and, hopefully, together we can all develop our self-discipline together.  I believe in embracing the simplest way to do things in every aspect of my life. Having very strong self-discipline makes any other change you undertake that much simpler to achieve.  If you know that you have developed your self-discipline to a high level, the guesswork for any habit change is removed.

Why is self-discipline important?  Many self-help gurus have argued that self-discipline should take a backseat to motivation.  I vehemently disagree.  Being highly motivated is definitely a perk that makes everything easier.  However, as much as everyone tries to tell me, I will never be motivated for certain tasks.  Life is not always a basket full of kittens.  Sometimes you have to do things that aren't fun but still very, very necessary.  It would be disingenuous if I tried to trick myself into thinking I was highly motivated to take care of certain administrative tasks that are vital to keeping my life running.  It's just not going to happen.  This is where your rock solid self-discipline steps in to save the day.

Your self-discipline is what allows you to do things that are unpleasant, yet, important.  As motivated as I am to get into good shape and become a better runner, sometimes at 6:30 a.m. on a January morning in Michigan, I don't feel like running.  I can either chalk it up to not being motivated enough, or I can use my self-discipline to make myself get out there and pound the pavement.

As I said before, I am not an expert at developing self-discipline.  I am just a guy who wants to become more disciplined in many aspects of his life.  Therefore, I hope to do a series of posts where I will explore some different elements of developing self-discipline.  I will share with you my successes, my setbacks, what works and what doesn't, as I try to whip myself into the type of person that can do those unpleasant tasks without fail, every time.